TRAVERSING THE JUNGLE: EXAMINING ANALOGY USE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

Analogies are an important tool for supporting learning across many domains. In the context of psychotherapeutic interventions, analogies are often used in psychoeducation and are anecdotally known to be used by clinicians in sessions with patients. However, limited research has examined the use of analogies in clinical training materials, the frequency of analogy use by clinicians, clinicians’ knowledge of analogies, and the effects of analogy use on the therapeutic process. The aim of Study 1 was to investigate the presence of analogies in clinical literature. Results revealed that analogies are commonly included in treatment manuals and textbooks and that the analogies included tend to be simple and make use of real-life base concepts. The aim of Study 2 was to examine clinicians’ perceptions of analogies and how they report using them in practice. Sixty-one psychotherapeutic clinicians read a set of three analogies and completed survey questions about their familiarity with and use of the provided analogies as well as questions about their use of analogies in therapy more generally. Overall, clinicians reported frequent analogy use, with more experienced clinicians reporting the highest frequency. Clinicians with a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy orientation and clinicians still completing their doctoral training identified a significantly higher number of alignments within the analogies. Results from this set of studies highlights the idea that analogies are commonly used in psychotherapeutic contexts. Future research should continue to examine analogy use in psychotherapy and more specifically examine differences in analogy use as a function of client demographics and the relations between analogy use and therapy outcomes

The disruptive impact of attribute information on the effectiveness of analogies in print advertising as a means to enhance consumer learning of new product benefits

The presented study had two purposes. First, it pursued to demonstrate that it is more effective to use analogies in advertisements for really new products to increase consumers’ comprehension of the new product’s benefits than not to use analogies. Second, it aimed to test the (counterintuitive) assumption that inclusion of product attribute information in the advertisement in addition to the analogy would actually frustrate benefit comprehension. The results of the experiment showed that advertisements with an analogy lead to greater benefit comprehension than advertisements without an analogy. Further, it is more effective in print advertising in managing consumer learning of a new product’s benefits to use an analogy without than with additional product attribute information. The use of analogies did not increase purchase intention however. We discuss these findings and outline directions for future research

The Cognitive Power of Analogies in the Legal Writing Classroom

(Excerpt) New law students traditionally learn better when they can connect what they are learning to a familiar non-legal experience. Therefore, the use of an analogy, which can be defined as a comparison showing the similarities of two otherwise unlike things to help explain an idea or concept, is an obvious way to facilitate a student’s connection between the new and what is already known. An analogy is a logical step in introducing the complex processes of legal research and analysis by attempting to simplify the alien structure of summarizing that legal research and analysis into a coherent piece of predictive or persuasive legal writing. Analogies allow students to build on a familiar network of knowledge, making the learning more comfortable and the material more accessible. Analogies also stimulate a genuine interest in the task and promote a culture of supportive learning due to the many connections the students forge to diverse and wide-ranging, non-legal experiences. Integrating the use of analogies into the teaching of legal analysis and writing in a systematic way is a powerful teaching device. It is one that easily can break down the processes of legal research, analysis, and writing into simpler terms, thereby helping new law students understand, develop, and ultimately master these essential lawyering skills. This Article therefore proposes that faculty incorporate analogies into their classroom teaching by experimenting with interesting and engaging ways to connect all parts of the curriculum to the students’ existing knowledge base. This proposal has its roots in cognitive learning theory, which expounds that experts use prior knowledge or contexts, referred to as schemata by cognitive psychologists, to facilitate problem solving. When analogies are applied to student learners, students will assign a new experience meaning according to how the analogy fits into their existing schema. As students refine their understanding of the new information, they begin to identify connections between the concepts. This, in turn, enables them to expand or modify existing schemata or create new ones. Then, as they recognize the relationships among these concepts, they begin to develop domain-specific patterns of thought and eventual mastery over the relevant domain with practice. Thus, the basic principles of cognitive learning theory confirm not only the relevance but the great value of utilizing analogies as a teaching tool

Automation and schema acquisition in learning elementary computer programming: Implications for the design of practice

Two complementary processes may be distinguished in learning a complex cognitive skill such as computer programming. First, automation offers task-specific procedures that may directly control programming behavior, second, schema acquisition offers cognitive structures that provide analogies in new problem situations. The goal of this paper is to explore what the nature of these processes can teach us for a more effective design of practice. The authors argue that conventional training strategies in elementary programming provide little guidance to the learner and offer little opportunities for mindful abstraction, which results in suboptimal automation and schema acquisition. Practice is considered to be most beneficial to learning outcomes and transfer under strict conditions, in particular, a heavy emphasis on the use of worked examples during practice and the assignment of programming tasks that demand mindful abstraction from these examples

On Similarities between Inference in Game Theory and Machine Learning

In this paper, we elucidate the equivalence between inference in game theory and machine learning. Our aim in so doing is to establish an equivalent vocabulary between the two domains so as to facilitate developments at the intersection of both fields, and as proof of the usefulness of this approach, we use recent developments in each field to make useful improvements to the other. More specifically, we consider the analogies between smooth best responses in fictitious play and Bayesian inference methods. Initially, we use these insights to develop and demonstrate an improved algorithm for learning in games based on probabilistic moderation. That is, by integrating over the distribution of opponent strategies (a Bayesian approach within machine learning) rather than taking a simple empirical average (the approach used in standard fictitious play) we derive a novel moderated fictitious play algorithm and show that it is more likely than standard fictitious play to converge to a payoff-dominant but risk-dominated Nash equilibrium in a simple coordination game. Furthermore we consider the converse case, and show how insights from game theory can be used to derive two improved mean field variational learning algorithms. We first show that the standard update rule of mean field variational learning is analogous to a Cournot adjustment within game theory. By analogy with fictitious play, we then suggest an improved update rule, and show that this results in fictitious variational play, an improved mean field variational learning algorithm that exhibits better convergence in highly or strongly connected graphical models. Second, we use a recent advance in fictitious play, namely dynamic fictitious play, to derive a derivative action variational learning algorithm, that exhibits superior convergence properties on a canonical machine learning problem (clustering a mixture distribution)

Databases are like Box Stores: Teaching Information Literacy with Analogy

Teaching information literacy (IL) often requires instructors to explain and explore abstract concepts. This feat is never easy, as novice students often need a bridge between concrete and abstract thinking. Current research on the topic suggests one effective way to teach new, abstract concepts to students of any age is by using an analogy. However, it’s difficult to come up with effective analogies on the fly. In fact, Rick Wormeli has stated in Metaphors & Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject that “what may need to change in many of our classrooms is the purposeful pursuit of metaphors and analogies in our teaching instead of the momentary inspirations that may or may not be helpful to students\u27 learning (4, our emphasis).” In this session, we will begin by sharing some of our favorite analogies with you and explain how they have affected student learning at the EKS Library. We found analogies such as databases : boxstores (walmart & Target), Boolean searching : grocery shopping, and intellectual property : personal property. Each of the above analogies we use for library instruction came from different instruction librarians in our department and we each incorporate all of the analogies in our instruction. Next, participants will split into groups and identify difficult IL concepts to teach students. Some of those concepts will include: subject tagging of articles, scholarship as a conversation, and research as inquiry (the concept that its not just one search but revision, much like baking without a recipe). Then the groups will brainstorm effective analogies to better reach students. The groups will come back together and discuss effective analogies they came up with during the workshop time for difficult IL concepts. Difficult concepts that participants did not find analogies for will be discussed among the whole group for further ideas. The attendees will have a list of IL concepts and analogies to take back and try at their institutions. Resources we will refer to: https://login.proxy200.nclive.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&bquery=teach*+AND+(analogy+OR+metaphor)+AND+%26quot%3binformation+literacy%26quot%3b&cli0=FT1&clv0=Y&type=0&searchMode=Standard&site=eds-liv

Models of conceptual understanding in human respiration and strategies for instruction.

Prior research has indicated that students of all ages show little understanding of respiration beyond breathing in and out and the need for air to survive. This occurs even after instruction with alternative conceptions persisting into adulthood. Whether this is due to specific educational strategies or to the level of difficulty in understanding a complex system is an important question. The purpose of this study was to obtain a deeper understanding of middle school students\u27 development of mental models of human respiration. The study was composed of two major parts, one concerned with documenting and analyzing how students learn, and one concerned with measuring the effect of teaching strategies. This was carried out through a pre-test, learning aloud case studies in which students engaged in one-on-one tutoring interviews with the researcher, and a post-test. Transcript data from the intervention and post-test indicates that all students in this study were successful in constructing mental models of a complex concept, respiration, and in successfully applying these mental models to transfer problems. Differences in the pretest and posttest means were on the order of two standard deviations in size. While findings were uncovered in the use of a variety of strategies, possibly most interesting are the new views of analogies as an instructional strategy. Some analogies appear to be effective in supporting construction of visual/spatial features. Providing multiple, simple analogies that allow the student to construct new models in small steps, using student generated analogies, and using analogies to determine prior knowledge may also increase the effectiveness of analogies. Evidence suggested that students were able to extend the dynamic properties of certain analogies to the dynamics of the target conception and that this, in turn, allowed students to use the new models to explain causal relationships and give new function to models. This suggests that construction of causal, dynamic mental models is supported by the use of analogies containing dynamic and causal relationships

The effect of multiple knowledge sources on learning and teaching

Current paradigms for machine-based learning and teaching tend to perform their task in isolation from a rich context of existing knowledge. In contrast, the research project presented here takes the view that bringing multiple sources of knowledge to bear is of central importance to learning in complex domains. As a consequence teaching must both take advantage of and beware of interactions between new and existing knowledge. The central process which connects learning to its context is reasoning by analogy, a primary concern of this research. In teaching, the connection is provided by the explicit use of a learning model to reason about the choice of teaching actions. In this learning paradigm, new concepts are incrementally refined and integrated into a body of expertise, rather than being evaluated against a static notion of correctness. The domain chosen for this experimentation is that of learning to solve "algebra story problems." A model of acquiring problem solving skills in this domain is described, including: representational structures for background knowledge, a problem solving architecture, learning mechanisms, and the role of analogies in applying existing problem solving abilities to novel problems. Examples of learning are given for representative instances of algebra story problems. After relating our views to the psychological literature, we outline the design of a teaching system. Finally, we insist on the interdependence of learning and teaching and on the synergistic effects of conducting both research efforts in parallel